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InfoQ Homepage News Atlassian Acquires GreenHopper Adding Agile PM to JIRA

Atlassian Acquires GreenHopper Adding Agile PM to JIRA

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Atlassian announced the acquisition of GreenHopper from GreenPepper in order to add agile project management support to Atlassian's JIRA product line. Also announced was the availability of a new Web mini-site called "agile@Atlassian" for "To share perspectives on agile software development and explain how Atlassiaon engineers use agile software techniques themselves."

Pyxis Technologies developed GreenHopper as a JIRA plug-in and the acquisition by Atlassian will enhance the integration and consolidate support for the tool. GreenHopper adds five agile project management tools to JIRA's issues tracking capability: A "Planning board" that adds a global view of open issues , versions, and components; a "Task board" that offers issue filtering, sorting, and tracking; a "Chart board" with burn-up, burn-down, and value charting; a "Card view" for story card support; and a "Search view."

Atlassian currently supports agile development with a set of tools that include, Bamboo for continuous integration, Crucible for code reviews, Clover for code coverage analysis, and JIRA for issues tracking. This new acquisition solidifies Atlassian's intent to, "give agile developers a seamless approach to project management within JIRA," according to Mike Cannon-Brooks, Atlassian CEO and co-founder.

Atlassian was asked about the apparent conflict arising from the promotion and use of automated tools by an agile community that tends to be suspicious of "substitutes" for the tangible tools and techniques evident in an agile project space. The response:

"We see our tools as a complement to, not a substitute for, the traditional agile tools and environments. We respect the metaphor and the value of a tangible story card and the Card view provides a bridge between the physical and electronic tools. Other tools, like the Chart view, remove a lot of the work necessary to create accurate burn-down charts, as one example. And, perhaps most importantly, development teams do not always enjoy the luxury of co-location, and therefore cannot take advantage of physical channels of communication. For distributed teams, an automated and shareable tool, like the GreenHopper-JIRA integration provides significant value."

Atlassian also noted that, "our tools add global perspectives and enhanced release planning capabilities that agile teams have found very useful, tools that are not explicitly addressed in traditional agile methods."

 

GreenHopper is fully integrated with Atlassian's agile development suite (at no additional cost) and can be purchased as an add-on for their JIRA Enterprise Hosted and JIRA stand-alone offerings.

Atlassian is best known for its Confluence Wiki and JIRA products. The "Agile@Atlassian" mini-site offers four major sections: people, practices, tools, and blogs and should be well received as another "information radiator" by the agile community.

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